John W. James

Where were you when I needed you?

The saddest question we ever hear is, "Where were you when I needed you?"

That's what people ask when they find out what we do in helping grievers. We're presenting helpful and accurate information on this site, at the time you need it most, with the hope that you'll never need to ask that question.

It's an honor and a sad privilege to be addressing you, knowing that each of you has recently experienced the death of someone important to you. We also know some of you are reading this because of your care and concern for someone who is confronted by the death of someone important in their life.

We bring our personal experience in dealing with the deaths of people who were important to us, and our professional know-how in helping grievers for more than 30 years. We'll help you distinguish between the "raw grief" that is your normal and natural reaction to the death, and the equally normal "unresolved grief" that relates to the unfinished emotions that are part of the physical ending of all relationships.

A basic reality for most grieving people is difficulty concentrating or focusing. With that in mind, we asked Tributes.com to print our articles in a large type font to make them easier to read. Sharing our concern for grieving people, they agreed.

Ask The Grief Experts

Sometimes the poetry of a phrase is powerful, but the implied solution cannot be taken literally. (Published 3/11/2014)

Q:

He was my grandson. He was only ten. His mom, my daughter was driving the car. It has been five years, and the waves of grief are still overpowering sometimes. My daughter is still totally devastated. I know tears last for a night, joy cometh in the morning. But when will morning come? This is pure hell!

A Grief Expert Replies:

Dear Anon,

Thanks for your note and question.

We are familiar with Psalms, 30:5, one of the translations of which is: For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.

If you look closely at the whole section, you realize that it is a parable with an implied time component, and is not intended to be literal. We realize that you understand that since you ask so poignantly when that morning will come.

And while the poetry of the phrase is powerful, it can be limiting in that it sets you up to ask when it will happen for you—and perhaps for your daughter as well.

But within both the scripture and your question, there resides a problem, that being the implication that time is a healer of emotional wounds. But if so, then even five years is not enough? Or ten or twenty and so on?

Time can’t heal or complete an emotional wound. Time only can pass. It is the actions that we take within time that can help us move forward in response to the tragedies that tear us apart.

Please go to the library or bookstore and get a copy of The Grief Recovery Handbook. Read it and take the actions it outlines. As you do, you will sense a real shift in how you feel, and with it, hopefully, a new morning.

We’d like to add that if you get the book and take the actions and feel a shift, your daughter will see the changes in you and may feel encouraged to want to take those actions for her own heart.